Abstract
THE peat-mosses are a peculiarly interesting group of cryptogamic plants, which has attracted the attention of even ordinary observers from a very early period. No group of plants is more clearly defined in structure, in family likeness, and by the localities in which they are found. The wanderer over our moorlands, the sportsman in pursuit of game, are as familiar as is the botanist with their dense green or ruddy-coloured tufts, now covering over some damp spot or filling up some bog hole with a vast mass of vigorous vegetation. Nor is there wanting to them an economic value, and that of too great an importance to be overlooked by even the most careless, for it is past generations of these bog-mosses which form the vast deposits of peat, for which as an article of fuel no substitute is in many parts of Europe attainable. The name sphagnus was first used, by writers like Theophrastus and Pliny, to indicate some of the spongy lichens, but was restricted to a genus of mosses by Dillenius more than a century and a half ago, “which were like none of the terrestrial mosses, but were produced always in bogs and marshes.”
The Sphagnaceæ or Peat-Mosses of Europe and North America.
By R. Braithwaite (London: David Bogue, 1880.)
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The Sphagnaceœ or Peat-Mosses of Europe and North America . Nature 22, 556 (1880). https://doi.org/10.1038/022556a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/022556a0